


A Hero in Her Own Right

by finnthejedi



Category: Marvel (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Heavy Angst, Mental Illness, Natasha Needs a Hug, Natasha-centric, Sickfic, deals with psychosis depression ptsd in detail, mentally ill natasha, probably au or altered universe whichever
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-08
Updated: 2017-12-31
Packaged: 2019-02-12 02:06:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12948972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/finnthejedi/pseuds/finnthejedi
Summary: A mission gone forces Natasha to relive some of her most traumatic memories. The memories haunt Natasha, even after she is safely home. Despite her torment, Natasha puts herself back into the line of fire-but now, she is hallucinating, and her ability to be one of SHIELD's best agents is slipping. No longer able to do the one thing she staked her identity upon, she spirals into depression, and her entire life unravels, leaving her deeply in need of intervention from her friends.Months later, SHIELD helps Natasha arrange a new life-working at a library in a suburb of DC. But because she finds some peace in her non-super life doesn't erase her connections to villains. It starts with a train robbery and Natasha's new superhero-crazed boss, and it sets the recovering Natasha on a journey to confront herself and her own version of the oft-asked question--what it means to be a hero.





	1. Tightrope

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to my new story. This work is the product of an idea I have had since I first fell in love with Natasha's character.

Leaning against the front of her desk, Natasha surveyed the children’s section, aware of the location and movement of every child sitting at the kid-sized tables. They were painting. Natasha had lined figurines of animals on the tables for the children to use as models for their art. If they wanted to, that is. As she was setting up for the children earlier, more than a few had told her what they were going to paint, and she found most of their plans more creative than the plastic toys she found in a crate in the play area.

“It’ll be a dinosaur,” Alice had declared, “with spikes all down its tail. But wings on its back so I can ride her. She’ll spit icicles—no, fireballs! Like a dragon.” The girl had paused there, scrunching her face before looking up at Natasha with wide eyes. “Are dragons dinosaurs?”

As Natasha listened, maintaining eye contact with Alice, she dipped paint brushes in the cup of water and swirled them in the little paint cups. She smiled at Alice’s question. “Dinosaurs and dragons are different—similar but not quite the same. How about I pick out some books about them for you, and you can tell me what you learn next time I see you?”

Alice nodded, hopping from one foot to the other.

“Dinosaurs aren’t real though…” a boy sitting close by moaned. He was fidgeting with a toy giraffe. “They’re like the fantasy version of the gurwaff.”

“Giraffe,” Natasha corrected, his pronunciation anyway. She smiled at the children gathering around her and laid pieces of white construction paper in front of them. Without a quick distraction that conversation might have quickly broke down into a hissing match. One of these same toy animals had been thrown while they were sitting on the rug around Natasha during story time once over a disagreement about whether something else was real, or maybe, whether she was pronouncing a name correctly. It probably happened more than once.

Really, though, Natasha didn’t want to take a side even in the slightest or explain which animals were real—not at that point in time. Anyway, she didn’t consider herself qualified to judge between fact and fiction. Giraffes and dinosaurs weren’t an existential question, he’d find out soon enough.

Natasha heard footsteps, small shoes hitting thin carpeting. She heard distinct sounds across the library—at the main desk where a patron and a clerk chattered, everyone’s breathing, typing, scribbling, pages turning. The doctors had taught her to ground herself in the present— to deal with the flashbacks that tormented her, but she’d been trying the skills to dull her spy senses as well. She could triangulate the exact location of these sounds in relation to herself. She could. They weren’t hostiles, the library wasn’t rigged with traps.

She felt the balls on her feet in her shoes, her legs crossed at the ankles, her palms on the laminate surface of the desk. She saw the colorful vinyl clothes protecting the tables, counted the last few footsteps until the girl ran up to her.

“Ms. Natasha?” The girl Julia held her painting—paint running from globs so thick the paper almost tore—up to Natasha. “I spilled the paint,” Julia sniffled. Natasha’s eyes darted from the dripping painting to the crying girl, choosing to put her hands on the girl’s shoulders.

“I was trying to make dolphins, jumping from the waves…but I poured the paint to get the water,” the girl confessed. A drop of paint splattered on Natasha’s shoe. She wore pink Converse, a going-away present given to her by Maria as she was preparing to start this job. They had been sitting around her living room on her last night in D.C., Maria and her on the sofa, Clint on the floor, drinking wine, mostly in silence. She had blushed upon opening the box, staring at the pink canvas and the bright, white rubber.

“You’ll need them to chase after the kids,” Maria had said, hopeful. Natasha had been still, knowing Maria and Clint were both looking at her, wondering.

Natasha could chase anyone, even children, while wearing heels, but her current colleagues didn’t need to know this. So she wore the pink shoes on days when she held programs for the kids, with whichever skirt and blouse she was wearing that day. And every other day.

“I can see the dolphins. They’re very pretty,” Natasha said. Natasha saw blobs of blue, green and grey paint bleeding together on the picture, on the girl’s baggy t-shirt and pants and now, on the carpet. She rubbed her forehead.

“Really? But I ruined it…” Fewer tears welled in Julia’s eyes now. She squinted at her painting, eyes scanning the page.

Natasha took the picture and laid it on her desk. “Let’s let it dry for now. Maybe we can get it how you want later. For now, how about we start a new painting?” Natasha squeezed Julia’s small paint-covered hand, grinning before leading her back to the table.

“Will you draw me dolphins, Ms. Natasha?” Julia look at her with wide, admiring eyes. Kids did that, Natasha had learned. In one of her past lives, Natasha would have read that look as fear. It would have been fear. The boy beside them watched Natasha as well. They wanted her to draw a dolphin, expected her to be able to draw a dolphin.

“Have you ever seen a dolphin, Ms. Natasha?”

“I saw dolphins at the aquarium!”

“Can we go to the beach?” Other children chimed in.

Natasha took a step back from the group of children, feeling a bit dizzy, the influx of energetic voices overwhelming her. She focused on inhaling. She would have exhaled as well, but she had to lunge forward to catch a spilled cup of water.

“Yeah, I’ve seen dolphins,” Natasha soaked up the puddle with a wad of paper towels from a roll sitting on the table. “I’ve been to the aquarium too.” She added, lest she leave any clues to where she had seen dolphins. Had she gone to the aquarium, she couldn’t recall, she’d have to suggest it to Maria for a future date.

Some time ago, she and Clint had seen dolphins leaping past the cruise ship on which they had been undercover, a mission that hadn’t been that fun despite the way it must sound. Clint had gotten sunburn—despite her warning him that the reflective surface of the water made the sun ray’s worse. He had thought she was teasing him, and went back to reading, that is, tracking the movement of some smugglers below deck.

Using a cruise ship to disguise illegal commerce, so original, but they stopped bad guys, not judged them—about their cunning, or lack-thereof anyway. That’s what Natasha remembered, another routine bust, until the dolphins leapt past, probably in a perfect arc right over the orange, semi-circle sun the horizon was absorbing. The fight with thugs had worn them out, yet they had to remain vigilant beside the secured cargo, waiting to reach land again, and Clint was moaning because he had had to shoot arrows with his burnt arms. At the time, the dolphins barely showed up on her mental radar. They weren’t her mission.

“Why don’t we draw a dolphin together?” And then you can color it.”

“You promise to help?

“Of course.” Natasha took a sheet of paper and a pencil and put them in front of Julia. Julia did the drawing, but Natasha helped her erase and try again when she wasn’t pleased with her work, and guided her hand at the tricky parts, mostly the fins. It came out looking like a dolphin, not perfect but kind of cute. Julia was smiling. She drew a smile on the dolphin. Natasha showed her how to wipe the excess paint from the brush on the rim of the cup and paint in slow, careful strokes.

Natasha went around to the other children as well, complimenting their work, asking whoever seemed restless to describe their pictures or encouraging those who made a mess to at least clean themselves up before their parents came to get them.

“Remember to leave your paintings flat on the table so they can dry,” Natasha reminded the group. She had given detailed instructions before they had begun, but that had been an hour ago, and she wasn’t certain she could recall what she had said. There had been a few attempts to lift the art—none of which ended too disastrously since Natasha sought out paint that claimed to dry faster than the next leading brand. It was a precaution to protect the rest of the library and their parents’ cars.

Parents trickled in to pick up their children, some of whom ran to their parents while others had to be escorted off. Many had to be reminded a third time that they could show their parents their art but had to leave it there. Natasha straightened the chairs as they left and gathered the brushes into a bucket.

“Ms. Natasha?” Alice was standing in front of her, waiting.

“Yes?”

“You were going to—”

Right, Natasha was going to pick out books for Alice. Unlike, apparently, her, kids never forget. Except she never (okay, maybe she had a miniscule rate of overlooking small details, since she, for the most part, is human) forgot either. Daydreaming, forgetting…this arrangement was kind of brainwashing her. But she still had the exact shelf location of every book topic in the children’s section memorized after a few glances at the diagrams on her desk. The image of the diagram stuck in her mind, the way so many maps of mission-related buildings had. Her life had been study the plans, navigate the structure, take out the target. More recently, the flashbacks and the hallucinations had stuck in her. Natasha had made it this far though, far enough to use that same skill to assist young children in a library in a small town, far away from combat, from her own illness (an overly forgiving description of her recent past). That was the point.

Natasha held up one finger, indicating one moment and hurried over to the section on dinosaurs. She picked one ‘non-fiction’ (to the extent that children’s books could be factual) book.

“What do dinosaurs eat? Where did dinosaurs live? Find answers to these questions and more!” read the words on the cover in holographic text that wrapped around the picture of a green brontosaurus. At the top of the cover, a pterodactyl soared over an array of Triassic conifers and ferns. Pterodactyls were not technically dinosaurs, in the same way that strawberries aren’t actually botanical berries, so she might be adding to Alice’s confusion. She handed this book along with a story book about a t-rex and a triceratops who have to work together to make lunch to Alice.

By this time, Alice’s mother, who wore a pants suit and a Bluetooth earbud and was looking at something on her phone, had arrived. Alice ran to her mom, the books tucked under her arm. She took her mother’s hand and pulled her over to where she had been sitting. “I drew a dinosaur!”

The mother dropped her phone into her purse and examined the picture Alice was pointing at. Natasha straightened a few books standing on an endcap. She’d have to look into getting some more accurate book about dinosaurs, maybe have a dinosaur night soon. Maybe get a living dinosaur. SHIELD had to have one in the basement of one of their most secured facilities.

“Thank you for everything you do, Natasha. I know Alice at least really enjoys these programs.” As her mother spoke, Alice looked at her feet.

There was no need for any thanks. Children’s programing was part of her job—the job she had imagined herself having since her college years, when she, who usually worked part-time in the Classics library, took a few shifts in the children’s collection as a favor for a friend. Her inspiration had about 100% less truth than the dinosaur book, but if she ever wanted to apply to a library science graduate program she would write that in her statement of purpose, along with everything else she could make up on the spot that would fit the criteria she knew they would want.

“Alice has expressed an interest in dinosaurs,” Natasha said, “I chose the books for her as a starting point.” She tried to emphasize starting point, a hint to the mother to not take the books too seriously. She didn’t want to question Alice’s intelligence or leave her with any further confusion.

“Say thanks to Ms. Natasha, Alice,” Alice’s mother said to her daughter.

“ThankyouMs.Natasha,” Alice was still looking down, but Natasha could tell her was smiling.

After Alice, her mother, and the rest of the children had left— except for Julia who was always the first to arrive and last to leave—Natasha rinsed the paint brushes in the staff bathroom sink until the water ran clear and dumped the used water, various shades of browns, down the drain. She consolidates the wet paintings to a single table in the corner, and tucks the cloths from the other tables into the supply drawer, where she takes the disinfectant spray and a cloth to wipe down the tables. It was well after 7pm now, nearing the library’s closing time and past the time she would leave on a night without a program.

As she was soaking up as much water as she could from the bristles of the brushes on a rag before putting them away in the storage cabinet where she kept the art supplies, a co-worker from the main desk, Ben, approached her. Footsteps, along with the sound of wheels on carpet.

“I don’t know how you do it, Natasha, letting kids paint is risky business.”

Again, it was her job. And she always did what the job entailed. “I draw the line at glitter,” Natasha replied, turning to face him. Ben smirked. He had brought Natasha a cart stacked with books that needed re-shelfing—more work for the morning. She’s have to bring some stain remover for the carpet as well.

“You don’t have kids, right? That’s how you can say that.”

“Yeah…” Natasha returned to putting away the painting supplies.

“My grandkids, luckily, they like to draw on the screens. Now-a-days, you touch anything, and you can draw in any color you can imagine. Back when I was a kid, we just had chalk.”

Natasha chuckled as she shut the cabinet. “When I was young, I was more into writing. I’d fill notebooks with my scribbles.” She reasoned that could have been true.

“Hah hah…when you were young…like last week.” Natasha shook her head at him.

Natasha’s purse was in the bottom drawer of her desk, and her leather jacket was hung over her chair. She grabbed both. “I’ll see you tomorrow?”

At home, after changing into more comfortable clothes, Natasha sat on her sofa. She called Maria, figuring she’d be home, put the phone on speaker and set the phone on the arm rest. The phone rang a few times, there was some rustling and then Maria’s voice.

“Nat!”

“Are you home, Maria?”

“Nah, not yet. Now that you mention it, I should leave…”

“Okay, call me back when you get home then. You’re not needed for a mission or anything?”

“No, no, I was just working on stuff—deputy director stuff. As of now, I’ll still be available this weekend. I’ll come see you.”

“Call me back, Maria. I need to eat something anyway.”

“Alright, alright! I love you, Nat.”

The changes in Natasha’s life had had the bonus of helping regulate Maria’s schedule as well. Where she would have stayed at SHIELD HQ all night far too often, she now left in the late evening so she could get home to call Natasha. She used to book her weekends with work the same as any weekday, but since she had been visiting Natasha in the suburbs, she took the days off.

“Love you too, Hill.”

Natasha got up and went to her freezer. Inside, she had plastic storage containers filled with food she had cooked Sunday afternoon. She took one, dumped it on a plate and punched three minutes into the microwave. The window of the microwave fogged up as it warmed up the plate. Natasha sat at the table watching it turn, blurred by the steam. She rested her arms on the table and stretched her legs. The microwave beeped, and she rose to stir the food. It would need a few more minutes.

When Maria called back, she was again settled into the sofa, her feet on the coffee table, eating the albeit reheated grilled vegetables and brown rice.

“I’m home now,” Maria clattered some metal in the background, “that’s me putting frozen pizza in the oven. What’s up, Nat? How are you feeling?”

“Well, I painted with little kids this evening.”

“Well, that sounds fun!” Natasha could still detect Maria had to a degree to fake her enthusiasm.

“More fun than deputy director stuff?

“I’m biased. But really, that sounds tiring. Put your feet up.”

“My feet are up. Literally.”

“Please take care of yourself.”

Natasha frowned at a slice zucchini she was poking with her fork.

“We can do whatever you want tomorrow night.” Maria broke the silence.

“I’ll think about it.”

“Natasha…”

“Fine. Let’s go the aquarium.”

“No, Natasha.”

Natasha blinked, wondering if their phones had had lag, and Maria had meant that tone for some comment other than a suggestion to go visit the fish.

“Oh, okay. I was just thinking, you know how I told you earlier we were painting? A girl was painting a dolphin and aquariums came up so I thought…”

“Don’t you remember what I told you about dolphins?”

Oh, right, Natasha remembered. She must have miss gotten her dolphin stories confused. Clint had told Natasha the story about the cruise ship and the dolphins. Maria had had a different experience.

“Anyway, the aquarium is in the city. I’ll bring over the ingredients tomorrow night, and we’ll cook dinner and dessert. Just tell we what you want. How about fish?”

Natasha smiled. “Lovely thought.”

“So, shark meat, your place, whenever I can get my ass out of here and over to you. I’ll call you just before 11pm.”

Maria liked to hear from Natasha before she went to sleep. It had started as subtle way to check in with Natasha—but months on, instead of pushing back and asserting her mental health— Natasha embraced the calls. Maria sounded cute when she was drifting toward sleep, and Natasha like to imagine Maria, in her black bra and panties, tucked under her comforter, phone wedged between her ear and the pillow. Never mind that Maria probably stayed up hours after they said good night.

After saying goodnight to Maria, Natasha leaves her phone face down on the table next to her bed—beside the plush black cat Maria had given her. Natasha’s phone woke her up at 7am every morning, after she went to sleep at 11pm every night.

****

“Did you hear the news?”

Natasha is putting her lunch in the refrigerator.

“I’m following it on Twitter.”

Natasha’s right hand grips the refrigerator door, holding it open so the slight creak won’t distract her from over-hearing her co-workers’ conversation. They have their backs to Natasha, just outside the kitchen, sorting books that need to be re-shelved.

She knows where that phrase—did you hear the news—leads, the next line in the conversation, event in the well repeated sequence: [insert name of supervillain] is attacking [insert name of innocent civilian population being terrorized by supervillain while going about their non-super lives] or [name of strategic location attacked to gain necessary weapons or resources to prepare to launch a more devastating attack against some other unlucky civilians]. Please send help.

The coffee pot is percolating behind Natasha. There’s a thud as someone tosses books onto a metal cart, so many people breathing—at this hour, parents with young kids, maybe college students coming to study, someone using the computers—the click of their mouse, grunts of approval. Natasha can hear these people, can almost hear her the alert from phone, telling her to suit up because SHIELD had an urgent mission. But she couldn’t make out the rest of that conversation between her co-workers.

Natasha lets the door swing shut. She knows the kitchen, comes here numerous times a day—to store her lunch, heat it up, fill her mug with coffee, to turn the sink on and listen to the rush of the water as she counts the dings in the tile, the flyers stuck to the refrigerator, dishes drying in the rack beside the sink. She knows now to find a secluded space to retreat when she feels overwhelmed. When she is overcome with stress about how much she loves her work here, how she enjoys listening to kids chatter about nonsense, letting them spill paint on her shoes, helping them find picture books about the mythological dinosaur.

Natasha hadn’t received a barrage of texts from Maria telling (begging) her to ‘let the experts handle it’—let Thor blast them with jolts of lightning, Cap knock them away with the fling of his shield, or the agents with their stun guns deal with the threat. Maybe Maria had come to trust Natasha enough by now that she figured she didn’t need to remind Natasha to say safe, to run from battle, hunker down in a sturdy room with the other civilians. Or maybe Maria had too much else occupying her mind to worry about Natasha during a crisis (doubtful). Her friends just no longer factored her existence into their emergency response. No longer considered her an expert to call.

“Wanna help?”

“Excuse me?” The heat from the mug burns her fingers that brush against it. The mug feels heavy, like it is straining her wrist and pinching into her fingers the way certain high-powered guns once had, no doubt leaving an indent in her flesh. It’s a white mug, gold trim and a golden cursive N—which Natasha traces back and forth with her eyes. N for Natalia, Natasha, Nat… Not real, not everything she heard when her emotions ran high existed outside her mind.

“Natasha?”

Natasha’s co-worker shoves a stack of kids’ books into the hand not holding the mug. Natasha flinches, jerking the mug and splashing some coffee on her hand. The liquid isn’t that hot. She must have poured too much caramel creamer in while she strained to hear her co-workers.

“Those belong in the kids’ section. Someone just left them lying around last night.” The other woman rolls her eyes.

“What happened on the news? I mean… What were you talking about just now?” She needed to know. Freed from the concern that she might be hallucinating again—another civilian needed her help shelving board books, not her subconscious tormenting her—she could return to obsessively trying to not miss out on anything.

The woman squints at Natasha—who readjusts the stack of books, so they better align and she can clutch them to her chest.

“Why? You got anxiety about superhero battles? Hear that’s a complaint the doctors are seeing more and more—you know, the fear that you’ll get caught between Iron Man and Shadow Iron Man, or whatever the Bad Guy version calls himself, while they’re blasting each other and plowing through all the walls in sight.”

Natasha nods. If she nods, maybe the coworker will stop talking or change the subject before she can dig up emotions in Natasha that she couldn’t process by focusing her attention on her coffee mug.

“You look pale. Go drink that coffee. Maybe it will bring you back to the living.”

The doctors and her loved ones had been working on bring her back to the living too. Coffee did help. Coffee while working here helped more. Not being sent off to fight super villains apparently helped the most though.

The coworker strolls off, leaving behind the metal cart half filled with books leaning against each other—thick books she observes, nothing more that belongs in the children’s section.

Natasha’s desk is across the room, and she must pass people browsing the DVDs on their rotating shelves, more co-workers scanning books at the service desk—to reach it. Some days she doesn’t given the crowd and their quotidian tasks—the fact that she too is partaking in this scene—a second thought. Today she does. Today she’s aware she was an assassin for decades—who could only set foot in a library to carry out a mission. Today she knows she can only go one step at a time. She’s on a tightrope, the mug and the stack of books the pole tightrope walkers use for balance. If she looks down or to her side, she’ll crumble, miss a step and plummet, and she doubts she knew how to control her fear enough any longer to prevent her from having a heart attack on the fall.

When she reaches her desk, anxiety has her stiff and weak. She dumps the stack of books onto her desk as she sits down, and they spread across the open space. On the cover of one board book, a boy is running ahead of his parents—he’s grinning, eyes agape, the string of a red balloon wrapped twice around his hand. They’re at an amusement park, indicated by a roller coaster and a ferris wheel, both too large, out of proportion with the rest of the picture in the back ground.

Behind the scattered books, kept at the edge of her desk, beside the out-facing plaque that read “Ms. Natasha,” is a picture of her and Maria. They too were at an amusement park, and Natasha is wearing the floppy hat that Maria had plopped on her head. It had been a cloudless day, and Maria had told her, while she was looking in the mirror watching herself apply sunscreen to her face, that it might not be enough due to Natasha’s especially pale complexion. Natasha had turned to argue, but before she could get a glimpse of her girlfriend, Maria had dropped the hat on her head, and all she could see is a strip of light out the bottom of her eyes. She had remained in the dark, her eyelids rubbing against the stiff material as she blinked, until Maria flicked the front of the hat from her face. When Natasha had turned to look in the mirror, Maria had draped her arms over Natasha’s shoulders, resting her chin on her arm so Natasha can see Maria’s face beside her as she appraises her reflection with the hat. She had had splotches of sunscreen left on her cheek and nose.

When Natasha started this job, Clint had had the picture printed and framed, had given it to her saying “I’ve been told non-spy type people can not only talk about their loved ones but also have pictures of them lying around.”

After they’d taken that picture, Maria had admitted that while she did worry about Natasha’s fairer skin, she also—mostly—imagined Natasha would look adorable in that hat. Now, Natasha touches the Maria in the picture, whose short hair is sleeked back with sweat and the shirt if unbuttoned lower enough to show some cleavage. They both looked cute then, putting their heart and attention into just that moment—not looking over their shoulder.

“There’s been a train heist!”

Natasha’s mind snaps back to the present. She scans the books laying on her desk, wondering which one her boss was mocking. But no trains. Not even a train robbery.

Leslie sits on the edge of Natasha’s desk. “I wrote a story about a train heist during my writing electives in graduate school. It was windy and ultimately, just clunky and blowing off steam.” She winks. “Get it? Like a train!”

Natasha smiles. It’s just her natural reaction. “Let me see if I can find you any train books…” Natasha’s tapping her fingers on her keyboard. Like she had been typing but reached a mental block and was hoping the random movement would jog her thoughts. But she was waiting for Leslie to continue her story.

Leslie’s smirk morphs into a more serious expression. “The guy with the arrows stopped it and retrieved the whatever the robbers were trying to steal from the factory the train was leaving. According to the news anyway.”

As a reflex, Natasha opened her mouth to say Hawkeye—Hawkeye’s the one with the arrows (and my best friend and past partner)—but she remains quiet. She’d regret coming off as too keen. Anyway, the one with the arrows was as accurate a description of Clint as any.

“Why’d you fight with arrows though?”

Natasha’s affection for Clint forces a smile.

“It’s really hard to give up how you’ve always done stuff, how you were taught to do stuff.” Again, that’s as good a description of Clint as any.

“Apparently, it is effective so who am I to comment. He’s over there walking atop moving trains.  I couldn’t do that.” That’s the image they keep showing on the news. Leslie drops her phone in front of Natasha, zooming in on a picture of Clint perched on the train’s shiny steal top, shooting arrows through a window cracked two inches at most in the next car. It’s because he—almost literally—got good at walking on tight ropes, Natasha thinks.

“Yeah, effective.” Natasha crosses her legs and arms and leans back as she continues. “I read somewhere he took out SHIELD’s most wanted once… with four arrows, fired from a single shot.”

Leslie’s eyes widen. “So you’re into superheroes too?”

Natasha’s eyes jump to the picture of Maria. She uncrosses her legs and raps her fingers on the keys again. If Leslie’s surprise was any indication, she must not come off as someone who wasn’t into super heroes. Maybe it was the cardigan and wool skirt or the tight curls she wore in the front of her red hair. Maybe so, but there was one superhero she was into. She needs to stop talking before gets too facetious.

“I was thinking,” Leslie says, “we could have a superhero-themed night. Hell, we could make it into a whole week-long event.” She gazes into the distance, scheming.

“We could!” Natasha echoes. She pushes herself up with her palms on her desk. “But this afternoon, I gotta clean up from last night’s painting and monitor some high school volunteers.” Her planner with the full details of her schedule is beside her right palm, but she’s retained enough of her former self to have memorized her days as far out as they have planned them.

“I’ll take these off your hands than, so you don’t get distracted.” Leslie scoops up the books and begins to walk off. Once she’s gone a few strides, she turns. “Or well, off your desk.”

Natasha smiles as Leslie leaves for real—maybe to shelve the books, maybe to deposit the pile elsewhere, having all the best intentions toward putting them where they belong but also determined to research what others have done for super hero themed programs.

At this point, Natasha’s coffee is cold. She drinks it regardless because she did pour a lot of caramel creamer in, and she loves caramel even in the form of cold coffee. After gulping the cold, sweet drink, she stretches. She’s got to hang the art from last night on the bulletin board that is one wall of the corner where they have games and story time. She’s got to—

A young boy had approached her desk while she was straightening the stack of puzzle boxes on the shelf, his arm stretched out with a phone in his palm.

“Do you have this book?” The boy mumbled, but he remembers to grin.

Natasha blinks, unsure—for once. “I’m not sure. Give me a second to look it up.”

****

“I heard the one with the arrows saved the day earlier.”

“Did you talk to him?” Maria’s voice sounds like she needed to plot a cover-up.

“He haven’t told me any ‘trigging’ details, if that’s what you’re asking, Maria.” Natasha listens to Maria’s static-infused breath. “Sorry,” Natasha finally concludes. She’s not sorry because she resents that they insist on holding a net beneath her. Even though they too know Natasha is still balancing on that tightrope, tip-toeing through this life where she is an assistance to the children’s librarian, working with young kids when she knows, and they know, that so much of her trauma is caught up with violence against young children. She hadn’t worked with kids since she had been a girl herself, and her mission was to out-perform the other girls. Beneath Natasha are missions that she can’t carry out without screaming, huddling and crying—hallucinations about past missions where she was not the heroine. Maria is right to insist she focus ahead.

Maria is still on the line, probably thinking what Natasha is thinking, remembering how the doctors had instructed her in how to deal with Natasha if she got overwhelmed by emotions, the doctors she can call if she can’t calm Natasha herself.

“A pair of criminals we seem to have never encountered attempted to rob a train heading toward an experimental military laboratory. The lab we’ve got eyes on, but we were blind-sided otherwise.” Maria admits this error and its consequences with a flat voice, as if the incident, investigating the incident frayed Maria’s nerves. Natasha imagines Maria running her hand through her hair, pacing, demanding agents to check and recheck records.

“Rough day.” Natasha reflects to Maria. She should be the one concerned about Maria, who is still in the most stressful job, who isn’t great at handling stress herself, but Maria’d never have it. Natasha is too fragile.

“You too?” Maria perks up. Because she thinks she might need to help Natasha.

“Oh, real rough… monitoring story time, shelving books…”

Never mind that Natasha had also freaked out because she had thought her co-worker’s request for her to do her job was a hallucination triggered by her emotions about no longer qualifying as a superhero as supervillains attacked, that she had to focus on that mug, distract herself with a picture of them to bring herself back to reality.

If Maria knew Natasha’s day, she would regret telling Natasha that story, downplay what happened, make it seem like an every day occurrence. And then she’d never tell Natasha another such story. She’d go back to calling Natasha only when she had left work, when she would sidestep any question Natasha asked about work, no matter how innocent.

Maria laughs. Natasha sighs with relief.

“Don’t worry, I’m working with Coulson’s team. They’re good at investigating. We’ll get to the bottom of it soon, and no one will have to worry about it again.”

“Well…” Natasha bites her lip, wondering if she should go on, if doing so would bring back the kiddie gloves.

“Hm?”

“Thanks to your agents over-looking these criminals, my boss wants to have an extended superhero event. Superhero week at the library! Planned and run by me… an ex-superhero in witness protection.”

“You’re not in witness protection, Nat. If SHIELD wanted you to disappear, you would.”

“And not be sleeping with the deputy director?”

“Natasha!” Natasha wouldn’t mind seeing Maria at that moment, flustered and fidgeting with whatever is around her.

“I’m sorry. They’ll be asking you to surround yourself with things that upset you.” Maria continues before Natasha has the chance to ask Maria what she is doing, what’s around her, what she is wearing.

“Apparently, superhero anxiety is a thing. I can fake that.”

“Most superheroes have anxiety. Superheroes speaking about mental illness would be a great anti-stigma campaign, don’t you think?” Maria is planning, Natasha knows, probably will have half the event scheduled before they finish this conversation.

“But Nat… you can’t say that.”

“No! I mean people, regular people, who have a phobia of superheroes or a fear of getting caught in a battle. I can pretend that I do—which according to you, is somewhat true.”

“Naaaat, come on, don’t tell me what I think. But yeah, you can pretend to be sick during that time. You have paid time off, right? Or you can say you have to take care of family.”

“I’d need paper work verifying any extended time off.”

“SHIELD.”

“You all will do anything to protect me.” It’s sarcasm, not appreciation.

“Yes.”

“No, no, no. I can manage. I was joking, Maria, teasing you. The past is the past. I have boundaries. Plus, the kids’ excitement is contagious. The memories won’t cross my mind.”

“Right, just keep your head down and do your job.”

“Sounds just like SHIELD. Maybe things really don’t ever change.”

“You’re starting to sound sarcastic.”

“You gotta be able to recognize how…. odd…unnerving this is for me, being on the outside of the spy/ superhero world, looking in like a fan-girlish kid, day-dreaming, reminiscing. I even got the crush to prove it.”

Maria goes quiet, and Natasha can imagine Maria is deciding whether to say “I understand” or “It is difficult” or “You’re better off.”

Instead, Maria goes with “I love you, Nat.”

Which was adequate. Natasha wore her pink converse for a reason.


	2. Three Incidents

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, as a heads up, Natasha deals with significant psychological distress in this chapter.

Natasha is heading to the coordinates to rendezvous with her target when her mind goes blank. Like someone had unplugged her brain and the screen popped off with a crackle, leaving her staring into the darkness. She’s standing in the middle of a sidewalk where the stream of pedestrians parts around her, creating two divergent paths. She’s as dense and dull as a rock stuck in the muddy bank of a river, the water rushing past her, hissing as it churns. Her lungs hiss as she gasps, as the blackness of her mind seeps into her vision, and she goes stiff, shocked that someone could get the jump on her with a weapon with invisible effects that in that moment, paralyze her, make her heart bang and her lungs collapse. The world becomes flat, a sheet of paper folded around her, wadded up and thrown toward the trash. Each direction she looks, the sky and the buildings, the civilians scurrying toward her, trap her, box her against brief imagines of the scene folding over here. Her senses flicker off.

By the time she comes to, Natasha has lost twenty minutes. She’s sitting on a webbed metal chair in front of a café. A worker there brings her a second glass of water.

“Are you sure there isn’t anyone we can call to come get you, or that we can’t call a cab to bring you to the hospital?”

Natasha tries to respond but even the two letters, whichever they were, escaped her. She would try to stand and sneak off—because she shouldn’t be seen by, let alone interact with anyone on her mission—but she wants to stay still. She gulps down the water, shivering as if passes down her throat and settles in her stomach. The water can’t delude the acid enough to weaken the gnawing pain of hunger and lingering nausea. At that point, Natasha had gone over 36 hours without food. The day prior she’s eaten an early morning breakfast with Clint since he was leaving for his mission before dawn, and he had found her lying on a mat in the gym, gaze focused on the rafters, arm pointing as if she wanted to identify something she was seeing to someone who didn’t see it. She had seen something, but she had forgotten what, only remembering that if she didn’t move maybe it would walk past and maybe she could keep her quiet hiding space, protected from their gaze.

“Natasha.”

Natasha looks around herself, confused that she doesn’t see the patio table where she laid her head as the café worker brought her hot fries with extra salt, which she had devoured between sips of water, or the rafters of the gym where she had spotted an old trainer from the Red Room watching her with the same eyes that had monitored her every day.

Natasha is in a briefing room across from Maria Hill, who is scrutinizing her with what Clint would call her ‘not angry, just confused” face. But Clint wasn’t in the room. Clint had been sent to clean up the mission she had botched. It was just her, the Black Widow, who regardless of Hill’s anger or confusion had nothing but venom for herself and her inconceivable failure. As a little girl, she had gotten herself stabbed in the stomach to avoid facing the inadequacy of abandoning a mission because she had lacked the skill and persistence to see it to completion. Yet now, almost two decades later, she had dragged herself back to HQ, ashamed and baffled herself, radioing Hill that she had failed to secure the target.

 “Natasha, do you hear me?”

Natasha can hear Maria now—though the pounding of her heart in her ears masks the sounds. Again, Natasha can’t string three letters and their respective sounds. She’s in a room in SHIELD HQ, with the deputy director who has taken her hands from her hips and sat beside Natasha.

 “Let’s avoid the fluff, Agent Romanoff. Did you hit your head? Do you have some amoeba devouring your brain? Because it sure as hell seems that way?”

“Ouch,” Natasha thought, almost wanting to laugh at Hill’s choice of words. Mentioning amoeba when Hill had no good reason to believe it had happened seemed like fluff to her. But she refrained from laughing because she didn’t want to spend the night in a holding cell, either meant to think about her insubordination or wait for a mental evaluation to determine if she was possessed or under mind control. Which she, for the record, had not ruled out as a cause.

“No, Maria. I did not hit my head. And no, my brain is not being eaten by bacteria or amoebas. I’d be dead if it was, you know that. And you also know you’d regret threatening me with that joke if it was.” Hill’s sarcasm had grounded Natasha back in the moment.

“Stop, Natasha, you fucked up. We’re lucky Clint was returning from another mission halfway between here and there, or that agent would have died out there because you… you forgot your mission.”

“I forgot the target, not the mission.” She’d forgotten both.

Hill rubbed her palms over her face. “You forgot, Romanoff. You forgot your target.”

“That’s what I said.”

“And that’s why I asked if you hit your head. You have never forgotten anything before in your life. Your memory is part of what makes you such a great asset.”

“Well… I did.” If only Natasha could forget things. If only she could forget she was no more than an asset.

Maria stares at Natasha as if at a loss to pick up the conservation again after Natasha shut it down. While Maria stares, Natasha ruminates.

Maria had sent her to escort out an agent who had been undercover at a corporation they suspected was dealing in contraband weapons, or that’s the story Hill told her anyway. Whatever—like every other time—for SHIELD, for the Red Room—Natasha had a mission, and she would do it. Get the agent out without attracting attention or inciting a fire fight, and without any casualties. It was a one-man job—not work for Strike Team Delta because there should be nothing to strike.

For Natasha, the mission ended with her scarfing fries at a patio set in a café that for all she knew could serve as a front for the criminal organization the agent now in need of extraction had been gathering damning evidence on or a trap to poison her. And she learned the meaning of a new concept: panic attack.

The café worker had slid into the chair across from Natasha—after dropping a slice of chocolate pound cake in front of Natasha, who had been staring at the empty plate. She could pay. She brought cash with her on missions.

“I’d tell you to eat, but you don’t need the encouragement, do you?”

Natasha stops. She’d been drinking water and is holding the tilted glass to her mouth. Please tell Clint that I eat, Natasha had thought.

“Comfort food helps you get calm after a panic attack, I hope.”

“A panic attack?” Natasha speaks into the still raised glass so her voice is muffled.

“When I first started working here, all the business people who came through, with their specific coffee order three times a day, intimidated me. I’d hyperventilate in the breakroom imagining I used soy when I should have added almond, and then the customer came back and bought up the café just to fire me and be a bad reference, so I would never work again. After my shift, I’d drown my anxiety in the lemon cake—I brought you chocolate because most people like chocolate more, but I’m more of a lemon girl. So I can relate.” She pauses, looking over Natasha’s shoulder and not into her eyes. “Or not. Do you get panic attacks often? I don’t mean to minimize your suffering. Sorry, now I made this awkward, didn’t I? I don’t usually chat longer than ‘how is your day going? … That’s good. Mine too.’”

Natasha sets her black hat and glasses on the table to pay better attention to the young woman who had helped her. She’s probably not a Hydra agent.

“I haven’t had a panic attack before.” The Black Widow having a panic attack was a laughable thought. She caused panic, not succumbed to it. The red room had instilled in her the importance of numbing herself, spitting at the tug of any emotion. Control yourself, she reminded herself.

“Oh? Oh, that must have been scary for you. I really hope the food helped then.”

Natasha thanked her. And she meant it. She had failed to will her heartrate down, but talking with the café worker was helping. Now she could hear the footsteps and cellphone chatter of the people hurrying by the café and the beeping of a “walk” sign, which her heart beat in her ear had silenced. Natasha could get used to socializing with civilians, instead of spying on them from the shadows and shoving them out of the way of danger.

“You’re not a business woman, are you? You don’t give off that energy. I get vibes that you’re a teacher or a librarian. Am I on the right track? Probably not…”

Natasha gapes. Her heart punches her chest.

“Is that a ‘yes’?”

“No, no—no to both. I need to leave.” The metal of the chair shrieks as she pushes it against the cement.

“Told you I made this awkward. Either that or you’re a secret agent and you’ll have to kill me if I guess too close to your cover story.”

Natasha leaves triple the cost of the food on the table and bolts, putting on the table and sunglasses again as she runs. She is a fucking secret agent, but she didn’t need to kill this woman for guessing her secrets. She’d have to kill herself for forgetting her mission, her life’s work. For putting lives in danger, for damn sake, while she indulged in both panic and comfort. for failing her mission, For literally the first time in her life.

Natasha considers telling Maria that she had remembered during that lull in their conversation that she had in fact hit her head.

“You remember something.”

“No.”

“Agent Romanoff, don’t lie to me. I can see it in your face.”

Natasha lay her arms and head on the table, so the deputy director would stop reading her mind through her face.

“I had a panic attack.” Natasha repeats the explanation the woman who helped her had given for her predicament. It made sense—if Maria understood panic attacks and could suspend her disbelief enough to accept one could disable the Black Widow.

Maria pales and grips the rim of the table. “Be serious, Natasha.” She shakes her head, and the demanding gaze returns to her face.

“I’m out, Director Hill. I got nothing else. If we’re done here, I need to prepare for the next mission.” Natasha bounces to her feet, pushes in the chair and strolls toward the door.

“We are not done here, Natasha. You still have not answer my most prominent question—what the hell is going on with you.

Funny, Natasha thinks as she’s leaving, Clint had that same lingering question.

***

When Natasha and he had been eating breakfast, Clint had kept flopping pancakes on her plate and dousing them in syrup. They’ll go down easier the squishier they are, he had said, and he had taken her hand across the table.

“Have you been having trouble sleeping?” Clint had given the dawn visible through the restaurant’s window a sideways nod.

Natasha sticks the fork in the drenched pancake, and beads of syrup seeps around the tines. She picks up the pancake and folds it over before putting it in her mouth. Chewing wrings out more syrup.

Clint fidgets with Natasha’s gloveless hand. “Have you been feeling sad, Natasha?”

Sad—Natasha mouths the word as she chews. She takes her hand from Clint and rests it on her cheek. She’d cried hours before when she had laid down in bed to sleep, after wine drank from the bottle while she sat stretched out on the roof of her apartment, back resting against the rickety fire escape. But she hadn’t felt sad.

“Natasha, if you’re sad, any of the doctors at SHIELD will be happy to talk with you again. Or we could find you someone else if you would be more comfortable.”

“I don’t need anything, Clint.” I’m well now, Natasha thinks. When Clint had first rescued Natasha, she had gone through extensive counseling after “de-programing.” She’d talked to their doctors. “I’m an asset to SHIELD.”

“An asset.” Clint scoops eggs into his mouth. A chunk falls to the plate, and he rolls his eyes.

Natasha smiles at her fellow agent.

Then Clint stops—smiling and eating his eggs. And Natasha knew why. On a recent mission, Nat had not done her best work, so to speak. Natasha had not been a vital asset to SHIELD.

“I’m worried about you out in the field.” Clint picked at the food on his plate.

“Let’s not do this, Clint. I have covered your ass countless time when you had an off day. It wasn’t indicative of an underlying problem when it happens to you, and it isn’t for me.”

“I did cover for you, Natasha. When I had to explain to Hill why we needed a cleanup crew when the original mission had ordered us to disguise our presence. I told her we miscalculated the time remaining on the bomb, that soldiers ambushed us and left us no opportunity to even try to prevent an explosion.” Clint and Natasha had not spoken about that mission after it happened. She had retreated to the gym, thinking she could force down the gnawing uncertainty with more training, while Clint dealt with Maria giving him the “just confused” look, at the fact that they yet again left destruction wherever they went.

“Hell, that’s our job. They fire at us. We fire back. Should I have let them shoot me? I’ll do that next time, okay? Let them kill me to avoid property damage.” She stopped herself from adding that right now, she felt, depending on the type of property, her life might be a worthy trade. If anyone could pick up on her hints, Clint would, but he’d also react.

“Natasha, you know that’s not what I mean. You missed easy shots. You couldn’t diffuse a bomb. You don’t miss impossible shots. You don’t have off days.”

“Is that how you think compliments work? We moved all the civilians to safety. We saved them. Is saving lives not enough anymore? Sometimes bombs go off. You deal with the mess they leave. That’s why SHIELD has a division to clean up the rumble.”

“That’s also why SHIELD has psychologists.”

Natasha glares about Clint. He had to know she’d obsessed over that mission in the days since. She had run through more ammo than typical missions. She had struck walls when she aimed at the militants. No matter how many times she replayed the sequence of events, she couldn’t convince herself she did what she could, couldn’t pinpoint what she could have done differently either. She read laziness in her memories, as if she had refused to exert that extra effort needed for the mission. Homes and businesses, people’s lives, collapsed in the gun battle, destruction she could have prevented had she made herself concentrate, made herself neutralize the threat sooner. But the buildings would have exploded regardless because she hadn’t had the ability to disarm it. And saying that sometimes their failure is inevitable—they can’t 100% save the day 100% of the days—wasn’t an excuse in the abstract, but maybe in this specific instance, she was telling it to herself to distract from her incompetence.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought that up. You’re right. We get challenging missions, ones that can’t be resolved sometimes. It wasn’t your fault. I didn’t mean to imply that. I just wanted you to consider why I’m so concerned about you.”

“Want to make it up to me? Don’t worry about me.”

“Give it some thought, Nat, or at least keep eating. You’re losing weight, and that isn’t healthy for you.”

“I’m wearing a loose shirt,” Natasha responds. She is—but her skin-tight SHIELD uniform also had become loose

Natasha, please.” He checks the time on his phone as he chugs the remainder of his coffee.

Clint, please,” She echoes. “Remember when I had to bring your hearing aid for you if you were going to have it? Because you didn’t need it.”

Clint bangs the cup to the table, rattling the empty plates around them. “Maybe. Shit, that was good. Wasn’t that good?”

“Then shut up,” Natasha says.

***

Once Natasha and Clint cleared the bottom floor, she sprints up the stairs—toward the attic of this secret base, jumping over overturned furniture and discarded equipment in her way. She takes out a few ambling enemies as she passed the second flood, never seeing them, disabling them only with a shot aimed from the thuds of approaching footsteps.

On the top floor, Natasha dodges a barrage of bullets that awaited her as she tore up the stairs. One lodged in the top step, and the wood splintered as she put her weight onto it. Her breath catches as she clutches the wall to steady herself, but calms as she flattens herself against the opposite wall. Somewhere on this level is the—probably—secret door behind which lies the target of her mission, an object they know nothing about but had been presumed dangerous. Reports stated bursts of energy that singed the surrounding foliage and sent shockwaves cracking through the foundations of buildings in the nearby town. They originated mere feet from where Natasha stands now. Trouble surely, she thinks, but nowhere near the level of trouble Strike Team Delta usually handled. SHIELD called in her and Clint when they needed assassins, when no trace of anyone’s presence could be left, or when they had to infiltrate locations which SHIELD could not safely establish an extraction plan.

Natasha sidles along the wall, feeling for a secret door, the hidden room where her objective lie. Her hand scrapes stone—rough in some places, a darker grey in others. Or she thinks the grey grows darker as she goes, attributable to her eyes adjusting to the light and to working again after a forced rest. She recognizes the color of the air here, the grey hue draped over the hallway. It’s the color of her room when she doesn’t turn the lights on, when she lays on her side watching sunlight struggle to break through the slits in her blinds, before growing tired as the day wears on, finally giving up.

The hand touching the wall tingles, like the current escaped from her metal wrist guards and spread to her fingers. She wills herself to ignore the sensation, to focus on her surroundings, so she can just finish this mission and get back to that grey room. Stone walls, warped wooden floor boards, a single window with a thick shutter through which light only penetrates the fissures in the wood. Perhaps the energy bursts had struck them, splitting the grain, carving jagged slashes.

Footsteps echo through the hallway, heavy boots running toward Natasha. She’s pressed into the corner farthest from the stairwell, scrutinizing the patterns on the wall, almost shifting in texture and shade of grey has she watched it. An uneven surface could indicate an explosion blew off fragments of stone. Whoever was here could have an explosive device. She studies the patterns of erosion, perhaps the imprint of splatter or disintegration from exposure to toxic air. It could mean they were dealing with a chemical weapon. She can’t find any evidence of such a weapon, but she needs to warn Clint anyway about what might be in play, tell him to watch his step so he doesn’t trigger an explosives or traps—tell him to evacuate the nearby town.

The footsteps morph into soldiers, pointing large guns at Natasha, guns that she knows could pummel her with hundreds of bullets that would explode within her—hollowing out her bones, bursting her organs, their respective contents flooding into her body. She feels weighed down from all that flood shifting within her, from her flesh beginning to heal around the metal shards, absorbing the bullets so they become a part of her.

Natasha steps back, her thin heel poking the corner where the floor’s wooden planks hit the stone walls. Natasha’s own bullets pass through the soldiers. They strike the wall opposite her, shattering the wood of the shutters and the glass behind it. The shards of glass bounce around Natasha’s head as they fall, inflicting a sting that makes her shiver. She tastes blood. Sunlight floods the room through the bullet holes, casting shadows of the soldiers on Natasha’s body, except for where the bullets had passed. There the light passes through the holes unimpeded.

“Take her alive. She will be useful later.” A voice says.

“No, kill her. Cast her out the window. She’s useless—can’t even do the one job she had.” Another voice responds.

Natasha keeps firing, her eyes squeezed shut because the light is jabbing at her eyeballs. The cuts along the surface of her brain, revenge of the glass she shattered, hurt. Another soldier’s footsteps climb the stairs. She has to stop the current wave before their friends arrive. She should be able to neutralize dozens of soldiers. She can hear the mechanics of the guns they fire, gloved fingers on triggers. She can feel the heat radiating from the barrels, bodies surrounding her. The soldiers keep repeating that she can never stop them, that she’s trapped. Natasha is trapped in that hallway, pressed against the wall as the men approach her. She blinks at the light penetrating the bullet holes in the window. She sees specks of dirt floating in the slant of light and considers charging the soldiers. Maybe she could gain enough momentum to stun them while she hurls herself through the window.

“Nat? Natasha?” Clint’s voice floats over the bodies and the bullets. “Nat, what are you shooting at?” Clint stands at the top of the stairway, hands held up—although, he clutches his bow in one hand and an arrow ready to be fired in the other.

As Clint nears Natasha, he tramples the bodies of the soldiers she had stopped. She hears the crunch of a skull as he crushes it, sees bright red blood ooze from the bodies puddle. When Clint steps in it, it soaks his boots and they stamp bloody footsteps on the wooden floor. Enemy combatants stalk Clint. They’ve swarmed the room. Natasha aims at them, ready to fire as soon as Clint moves so she can get a clean shot without grazing him.

“Clint! We have to get out of here. There’s too many. I can barely see.”

The room tilts. Clint takes the gun from Natasha’s outstretched hand. “You’re right about that—we gotta get you out of here.”

Natasha had known not to shoot. Rid of the weapon, her hand tingles again. She studies her black, fingerless gloves, her fingertips covered in grim from the wall she had traced mixed with sweat.

“The target with whatever unknown object ran off while we were dealing with the guards. I got him in the leg with an arrow, some other agents hunted him through the woods. They’ll catch him, and someone else will analyze this mess. We’re done here.”

Clint is gripping Natasha’s arms as he speaks. He means to comfort her, she knows, but also to restrain her. She closes one eye and squints, grounds herself on the feeling of her heel in the wood, the outside air replacing the must through the wall she had barraged with bullets, Clint’s thumbs circling her flesh she knows she had been alone in the attic. But the stench of blood sickens her. She squirms, trying to break from Clint’s grasp so she could rub the imagine of the soldiers, eyes bulging, blood already drying and stiffening their clothing from her eyes.

“I did this. They had me surrounded. They could have shot, but they didn’t, and I killed them anyway.” Natasha can feel herself gag, her mouth water.

“You haven’t killed anyone, Natasha. We captured the enemy combatants. They’ll talk. You did good.” The grey attic dulls Clint’s eyes, the way the grey in her room dulls his eyes, turns his skin ashen as he reaches to her lying on her side.

“The Black Widow has slaughtered an innumerable—” Natasha recalls Clint’s face as grey—like the bodies in front of her, with their skin that would soon curl and crumble. She can’t overcome the resistance to expanding her lungs, so she sucks in air with as little effort as she can manage.

“I’ve hurt so many people, Clint. I don’t think you can fathom the devastation I’ve caused.” In that moment, she might be hallucinating, but that part is real.

“Ssshh, stay with me, Natasha, okay. You’re hyperventilating. You need to relax. I promise you’re safe.”

Natasha tastes acid. It climbs her throat and creeps into her mouth. She’d have thrown up on Clint, but her stomach had nothing beside the acid in it to eject.

“I… don’t feel… right.” Clint lets go of Natasha’s arms as she mutters these words, instead putting one arm behind her legs and the other along her back so her can lift her. He holds her crumpled body against his chest. She’s watching the ceiling fade in and out now, hearing her heart pulse through her ears.

“Shit, I told Maria not to let you go on anymore missions—but no, never listen to Barton, god forbid. Shit, Nat, if you can hear me, I’m sorry you’re going through such hell.”

“The Black Widow cannot be trusted.”

Natasha screams.

 

***

Natasha shifts on the rubber slab that counts as a bed in SHIELD HQ’s medical center. The nurses has pegged the bed so she could sit up as they infused her with fluids—although she hadn’t been dehydrated. And she had resisted. The needle slipping through her skin was too similar to the exploding bullets. It could puncture through the other end of her vein, spilling blood into her body until her other organs drowned because they couldn’t breath beneath the blood. Or her brain could soak up the liquid they’re pushing through her veins with their clear bag and the skinny plastic tube and explode her skull. Already, she feels like her brain is swollen.

“Beep, beep,” The heart monitor shrieks. The default background chatter, Natasha reminds herself. The beating isn’t counting down until her heart explodes—the way a time bomb she once left armed near a fountain in a market on a Sunday when families were scuttling about buying or peddling fresh food, and a child had tugged at the scarf that had begun to come unraveled from her neck and dangled. The sun’s light had reflected off the rippling fountain water. The boy had tugged again, and she sets her bag down, sitting on the faded, scratched stone ledge. The sounds of footsteps surround her—none approaching. Voices haggle over the price of spices and fruit, argue about the merits of various loaves of bread. Nothing suspicious. Only the boy had paid her any mind, and she had used that to her advantage. Nothing odd about a young woman leaving her bag at her feet to attend to a child.

Natasha had unwrapped the scarf the remaining way and dropped it in the boy’s hands. It had spiraled into a coiled pile as it landed. They make eye contact. She sees the sun in his copper eyes, a hint of confusion at his luck. The boy must have seen his own reflection in Natasha’s think sun glasses as well. Then the boy had run off, the scarf trailing behind him, and Natasha triggers the time bomb. The fountain flows behind her from the hand of a marble man sculpted into some yoga-pose.

She hadn’t heard ticking then. She heard her constant surveillance, the noises that still come to her the moment her surrounding change. The praise they gave her when she returned to the Red Room indicated she had succeeded—although she knew she had because she knew that how to do her job. Back then, she had heard the voices of the Red Room, training her, commanding her, informing her what would happen if she ever defied them.

Now, Natasha hears the ticking of that time bomb, in the beeping of the heart monitor machine. The bomb had been meant to kill a single man. The heart monitor was meant to kill a single woman. Then, she had escaped the blast that would level the market in a causal stroll, knowing how fast she was walking in relation to the time she had programmed. Now she yanked at the IV, saw herself darting through the fabric curtain separating her from the rest of the world. But the nurses had taped the IV line to her skin, and it throbbed as she yanked. She hoped, if she really had wanted to, she could have ripped it off, that if need be she could sprint free, dodging agents and equipment, still equipped to the IV cart.

Instead she reclines against the top of the bed, putting her head on the fluffed pillow someone left for her. The rubber had some squish to it, and the blanket laid across her lap had felt soft to her skin which had been compressed in her suit up. She’s wearing SHIELD-issued pajamas. The raid had left her with some wounds and bruises, which the staff had cleared, bandaged and iced where necessary when Clint first carried her into medical after alighting the helocarrier, including the gash on her left palm, which she had rather they not touch. They’d given her pain medication too—despite her being in about as much pain as she was dehydrated—and feeling her eyes droop and her mind get woozy, she wondered if it had been the PM kind. She scrunches up on her side, pulling the blanket to her chin but exposing her feet, before finally closing her eyes.

The mission had gone well. They’d (almost) secured the object, prevented casualties, caught the criminals—a model performance, one for the training videos. She feels a nap coming on, could use some sleep to make up for the hours lost at night and to offset the exhilaration of the mission.

The staff had left a juice box and a cup of apple sauce on the bedside table. She had drunk the juice when she had first arrived, while they were threading the IV into her vein—to demonstrate she wasn’t in danger of dehydration, and she might as well eat the apple sauce now so hunger wouldn’t disrupt her nap. As Natasha is peeling the foil lid from the cup, a nurse rolls back the curtain and enters Natasha’s corner.

“It is good to see you’re eating.” Smiling, the nurse nods toward Natasha she stirs the apple sauce.

“Why?” I eat, Natasha thinks, and I’m not sick, maybe a she’s battered up from the mission now, but she’s definitely at the lower end of “harmed” for agents returning from combat missions. The IV stings and her limbs burn.

The nurse squeezes Natasha’s shoulder. “Secret agent or not, you need proper nutrition.” The nurse is smiling still, despite Natasha’s frown. “Beside it will help you recover.”

“Okay.” Natasha snapped. The only thing she had to recover from was their demeaning treatment of her. Black Widows eat the weak after they get what they need, she thinks. Good source of protein.

“Will you let me draw some blood?” The nurse phrases it as a question, but she is holding the prepared equipment over Natasha. She’ll do it regardless. The care is routine, especially when one agent insists on carrying the injured agent into medical, not an assault Natasha tells herself. Clint and Fury and the medical staff had been repeating it to Natasha for years— “We only want to help you feel better. Please trust us to take care of you, Natasha.”

Natasha shakes her head, rubbing her thumb along the stitching of the blanket, focusing on Clint and Fury’s familiar voices. Fury is sturdy but distance. Clint’s close, resting his hand on her shoulder, tapping the scuffed fingers of his leather gloves on her own black suit to get her attention—sometimes just to tease her. She sees his bright eyes, his relaxed demeanor, and she reaches out because she didn’t have the opportunity to thank him on the way back to HQ when he told her to lie still, to sip the warm juice he found in the quinjet as he washed the worst of her cuts and left the cool, rinsed clothes on her skin.

The journey had passed in silence, all sounds muted to Natasha. She viewed the interior from behind grey filters, just shades of grey and worn yellow seeping into each other, staining her environment. A girl rests on the bench against the metal siding. A black suit droops from her bones. Her skin flakes, a hue between pale grey and yellow in most visible places, disturbed by splotches of dark red in others. The girl’s hair is red—like the bloody footsteps in the attic, at that market and every other place the Black Widow had ever struck. And this nurse will draw more blood from her.

“I am not a child.” Natasha sneers under her breath as the nurse touches her wrist, rolls up the sleeve of her pajama. Because children aren’t granted bodily autonomy, because you can jab them with needles as you please, inject them with experimental serum because they’ll never be strong enough or be worthy of a place in the world on their own, no matter their obedience or effort.

The nurse’s hand is freezing. She wraps the elastic hand around Natasha’s arm. It’s cold like the Russian air, the icy ground spreading through her clothing anytime she’d been pushed down during training, like the air inside the dormitories which they didn’t heat because it would bred laziness. The cold would build character. Natasha winces. Tears prick her eyes, like the needle entering her veins. She jerks her arm away from the nurse and the needle to rub her eyes. The cold hadn’t built character.

“Stay away!” Natasha pulls her legs to her chest and squeezes them, rocking forward and back. A bubble of blood forms around the needle prick. She pushes the nurse away, bats at her hands. The tubes the nurse had been holding clatter to the floor.

The nurse doesn’t move.

The clatter reverberates through Natasha’s mind. It knocks loose the anxiety, like a cave-in in her emotional center, burying her.

“I mean… please…” Natasha gulps. “Don’t touch me. Don’t… hurt me.” She’s that hurt girl in the quinjet.

As the nurse leaves without replying, Natasha hears her say, “The Black Widow is crazed, a dangerous psychopath. Who let her on any missions? We’re lucky she has yet to maul our agents.” Natasha flings her head back against the rubber mattress. She wants to unwind the bandage on her palm and run her nails along the cut.

Pinching the spot where the nurse attempted to draw blood, Natasha relaxes in bed. So, she snapped. She never got that worked up. The mission had just primed her to react. She imagines her own bed—far from covered in throw pillows or a lacey canopy—but she wanted to go home and bury her face into her own rough pillow cases, cocoon in her own long-enough-to-cover-her-whole-body blanket. It’s the closest her could get to comfortable.

“Agent Romanoff.”

Natasha groans. Her heart is pounding in her ear, and she hadn’t heard footsteps approaching. She wishes she had screamed “stay away” so much louder.

It’s Maria Hill, hands propped on her hips, glaring.

“You need to get yourself together, Agent Romanoff.” Maria had stared down Natasha just last week, demanding answers about a botched mission, and here she stood now again, witness to more failures.

But Maria’s are words Natasha can ignore. She is trying to get it together by napping, but they all insist on jabbing at her, with needles or words.

“She’s unstable. She’s violent. She’s going to kill someone if we don’t put an end to her now.” Maria also says.

Natasha snaps to attention, unable to ignore those acquisitions.

“I’ve never hurt any agent, Maria, you know that. You know me.” Natasha pleads. Why Maria, Natasha asks herself., why would you lose so much faith in me. What of all those evening we spent sitting on the bench in the park, Natasha wonders, long coats covering their uniforms, vodka bought at the corner store wrapped in crinkly paper bags. What of late night strategy sessions and too many calls in the morning to remind the other to get up (as if, they were necessary), Natasha wants to scream at Maria. She wants to ask Maria how she can just give up on her.

Maria looks confused.

“You need to stop behaving like this, Natasha. The medical staff is trying to help you. You’ve been through this literally a thousand times. You know that. You know us.”

“You’re useless to us if you can’t carry out your orders.” That’s not Maria’s voice. It’s the voice of a handler from the Red Room. It’s her own voice.

“I’m not useless.”

“Of course, you’re not.” Maria’s face softens, become more confused, less angry. “I just mean you’ll put yourself or someone else in danger if you keep acting so unpredictably.”

Natasha feels the tears. She clings to Maria’s waist, afraid she’ll lose the life she has here if she missteps or misspeaks, afraid Maria will deem her eligible only for the holding cells. She’s sitting, but the room is tilting again, spinning away, out of her grasp.

Maria hadn’t moved her hands from her hips. Now they’re trapped and immovable under Natasha’s hug. Natasha moans into Maria. She sees Maria slapping her back to the hard mattress. She squeezes Maria.

“Stop. Self. Sabotaging. Imagine your life depends on your mission. Your life depends on your mission.”

“Why? Why does my life depend on my mission?” Natasha whispers. Her voice crackles. She’s choking on the words she’s repressed for over a decade, rising through her throat like the acid in her long empty digestive track.

Maria pulls away, avoiding eye contact with Natasha. She sits on the edge of the rubber mattress, resting one hand on the metal railing, and with her other hand, she rubs her fingertips into Natasha’s pajama-covered knee.

“I’m sorry, Nat. Clint told me you weren’t well, but I didn’t believe him. I didn’t think Natasha Romanoff could be unwell, or at least not unwell enough to not send off—figured it would be therapeutic for you.”

“Just don’t give up on me…”

Maria looks up. “Don’t be ridiculous, Natasha. We’re not going to forget about you—”

“You’re going to cast me off. I’m dead weight.”

“Clint would pierce me with arrows until I looked like a porcupine.”

“Where is Clint?”

Maria sighed, bringing her hands back to her lap. Her feet balance on the metal bars underneath the hospital bed. She wears the same boots Natasha does—pointed toe, a thin heel, with a gel insert stuck inside to replace the flimsy insole. They bought the boots online while tipsy, because they were cute, but they needed to make them somewhat practical.

“Maria, where is Clint?”

“I had to send hill to track whoever fled the compound you raided. We have every reason to assume he is dangerous. We’ll wade through every speck of dust in that building, but we need the weapon he had to ensure he doesn’t pose a further threat.” Maria has her eyes shut, is tugging on the short ends of her hair as she speaks.

“Okay.” Natasha says.

“Okay?” Maria’s eyes pop open, and she stares at Natasha.

“Okay.” Maria will never respect Natasha as a competent agent again.

“You’re not…?”

“Oh, no, I’m pissed. You just lied to me. You said you weren’t going to abandon me. Yet, here I am, needle threaded through my veins pumping who knows what into me. Trying to make me docile so you can just—”

“Oh god, please don’t get paranoid, Natasha. I get that enough from everywhere else. The nurses should have told you. We’re giving you fluids. Your eyes were sunken and wouldn’t focus when Clint brought you. When was the last time you had any water?”

“I drank the juice they brought me. Clint made me have some more juice on the flight back.”

“How heroic of you.”

“Anyway, I had a bottle of vodka last night to calm my nerves before the mission.”

“I don’t want to hear this, Nat.”

The mission where she forgot her target had spooked Natasha. Her heart had pounded when she thought about disembarking from the quinjet to begin today’s mission. She imagined herself forgetting how to fire her gun, getting hit with a bullet because she couldn’t hit the enemy before they could shoot her. If she could forget her mission, she could forget how to sweep floors for enemies, how to parry blows and strike when the enemy leaves themselves open. If she got kidnapped when she did everything right, she could get kidnapped when she had forgotten how to be a secret agent. And that thought led her to chug the bottle of vodka. She had slid to the floor of her kitchen from the pain of the alcohol flowing down her throat. The bottle cracked, and she had taken the largest shard and driven it into her left palm. To silence the thought that had crept up on her, she would slice into her flesh, press her bloody cut into the puddle of vodka on the tile.

“I didn’t lie. When I said I wouldn’t abandon you, I meant we’re going to get you help. Like actual psychological help, not the kind where we hope whatever spooked you before gets spooked enough by more combat that it goes away.”

“I want to go home.”

“We can’t let you leave, Natasha. You’re weak, beaten up and hallucinating. Just try to rest. I’ll get a psychologist to come see you tomorrow, alright?”

“You think I’m crazy.”

“I think there is something happening to you that needs to be addressed before I throw you back into life threatening situations.”

Natasha notices how she’s tightening all her muscles, clenching her teeth. She looks at Maria—who isn’t the irritated Deputy Director but the woman Natasha drinks with, no less aloof but also more personally present in the interaction. Natasha smiles at her.

“This blanket doesn’t even cover my feet.”

Maria returns the grin. “I’ll get you another blanket, okay, and I’ll tell the nurses to give you medicine to help you sleep.” Before she goes, Maria rubs Natasha’s boney back. “When Barton returns, I’ll have him come visit you first thing.”

It took SHIELD three suspicious incidents involving Agent Romanoff to accept that Natasha wasn’t well, that the sickness lied in her mind—in the way she related to the world, to her own self. She had a reputation for performing flawless work. And she should have that reputation. After all, she trained since her early childhood for this line of work. She should face discipline if she can’t execute orders, should have no place in the world if she fails to make us of her unique skill set.

The nurse Natasha had pushed returns—working at SHIELD, the nurses had learned not to take any lashing out by patients personally—and puts two pills into Natasha’s hand. She leaves two additional juice boxes on her the table by the bed.

“Thank you.”

“Sleep well.”

When Natasha is alone again, she puts the pills in her mouth and the straw in her juice box. The apple sauce she had got distracted from eating when the nurse came tastes sweet, like blood that gurgles up after getting struck but also like the pancakes Clint soaked in syrup. She lays on her side, hands between the bleach-smelling pillow case and her face.

Maria returns at some point and parachutes a comforter over Natasha. She’s pretending to be asleep to avoid further conversation, but she smiles as she feels it land on her, and Maria tucks it under her socked feet. The voices could call her worthless, but if the deputy director of SHIELD herself personally took care of Natasha, how right could they be? Hell, once news of her recent experiences made it up the chain of command to Fury, the director of SHIELD would come check on her himself, she knew.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for readings!


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